


The Tide Occurred to Me

by bloodofthepen



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, F/M, Mostly Canon Compliant, prose is flowery as a trellis because I'm experimenting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 17:03:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18664630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodofthepen/pseuds/bloodofthepen
Summary: "Empress Emily Kaldwin has not been graced with a dreamless sleep in months. From dusk until dawn, the hours are painted with nightmares, with sublime visions, with the Void. She knows, no matter the scene nor players, that this all has to do with the Mark. After all, that’s when they began, these waking nights."As Emily explores the Void by night, she receives some troubling news





	The Tide Occurred to Me

**Author's Note:**

> My first sacrifice to the Void, with thanks to OneWhoTurns, Hirvitank, and IronMoon for their suppport!

Empress Emily Kaldwin has not been graced with a dreamless sleep in months. From dusk until dawn, the hours are painted with nightmares, with sublime visions, with the Void. She knows, no matter the scene nor players, that this all has to do with the Mark.

After all, that’s when they began, these waking nights.

Each evening, as she walks the space between worlds, she suspects that there is no such thing as a dreamless sleep, that there never was--only mornings where the night’s visions become ephemeral in the first rays of the sun. Before, she was blessed with forgetfulness, the ability to let her dreams fall away in dawn’s light. Now, it’s the Mark that makes her remember each one, every night and morning--for she carries the Void always under her skin, even after the last traces of stars have melted away, when the vestiges of night are cast off the earth below and bathed in gold.

But like the darkness beneath her skin, there are places in Dunwall, she knows, that the light never reaches, where the Void sits close enough to brush shoulders with murderers and liars and thieves.

With rats and artists and beggars and whales.

Sometimes, rather than dream, she cowls herself in rags to join them there. They are councilors of misfortune, emissaries of her city’s trials. They bring news that otherwise would never pass her glit desk behind towering walls of stone.  

Her father tries; he has never forgotten the sunburned streets that bore him as a child, has never forgotten the gutters that ran with blood and bile during the Plague. But he is too far removed from them now, reliant on contacts, upon missives passed from hand to hand--as she should be. As she is: renewed in her commitment to duty, to the name and crown she must wear, to her people, day after day after day.

But at night, she remembers.

And in the morning, she cannot forget.

* * *

 

Black water and shards of onyx. Midnight without stars, heavens of velvet. Blood that gleams infinite obsidian under moonless skies. Chaotic, not in the way of frenzied movements, but in order stripped away, devoured in silence.

Not silence, but such _sound_. Sound not heard with ears, but with whatever it is that lies in and under flesh, the stuff that makes the mind. It trembles like whalesong in atmosphere that flows but never moves, in a world neither dark nor light, beyond both.

There is such _hunger_ in it.

Traversing the endless expanse, planes of slate and obsidian, pulling herself with tendrils of the surrounding energy that hums on her skin, in her lungs, in her bones, she is never tired. The energy flows and flows as she loses herself in absence of light and thought; she can go forever without seeing a twisted image of reality, without stumbling upon haunting tableaus of her present or past.

It should frighten her, the gravity of this vast, endless thing, a space that seems alive--an entity in its own right, an entire world and nothing at all, a force like a storm, a consciousness that can be neither sounded nor fathomed. The Void feels so _hungry_ , as if it could swallow her up with one misstep, that she would fall and fall, every piece weighed and measured and quantified as it disappeared, devoured, swallowed up and forgotten in the jaws of this great beast.

Even in daylight, she sometimes thinks she could burn herself out, if only she would let the ravenous thing through.

It should terrify her. But touching this power in the light of the waking world, she only feels exhilarated, its roar in her ears, its tides rushing in to fill every crack and crevice otherwise achingly empty.

And at night, leaping until the dawn through energies like water and smoke, she feels comfort. Hunger, she understands--understands it as flame, all-consuming, raw power and determination. It burns as she burns. No one may take what is hers, and nothing may escape the final grasp of the Void.

As she transverses, it takes and it takes and it takes and it takes--the weight and responsibility, the thoughts and worries and ambitions--and it leavers her burning heart at its center, her mind clear until morning comes again.

When she’s ready to let it all go, the Void will be here to catch her.

* * *

 

He is there, always there. She can feel his presence--oil and smoke and whalesong--at the edge of her perception; not her eyes, exactly, nor her ears--but felt, somehow, known, even when he refuses to appear.

She could call him out. But she never does.

Emily sees him, sometimes, always at a distance, doing precisely what he does best. _Watching_. It should discomfit her, that infinite gaze cut from knowing obsidian as it pierces beyond thought and into the web of the future, straight through time and trivialities, beyond her simple and finite little existence, her singular drop into the devouring well of all things.

Yes, so many things that she should be and should feel, and it seems she’s destined to turn away from every one of them in some way or another.

“Emily Kaldwin, forever walking the space between duty and esse.”

She almost misses her target, and lands heavily on one knee. He has not spoken since Delilah’s deposition; the implications roil through her stomach, even as her blood thrills.

“Empress and heretic, vengeful and wise, just and foolish.” The Outsider draws himself together from fragments like oil and black glass, close enough to touch. “A little girl lost in dreams. An assassin on the rooftops.” He tilts his head, eyes catching hers as she stands, slowly. “Underneath the epithets, are you any of these? Or are you none at all.”

It isn’t a question, not really. Inquiries of her own buzz through her skull like bloodflies, but she remains silent.

Something stirs on his mouth, something like a smile, but so unpolished, unused, that it stands as a mere ghost of what it could be. “Hello again, Your Imperial Majesty.”

“Outsider,” she greets, without even the slightest incline of her head. He never bows, and neither will she. “It’s been some time.”

He nods, and begins that slow, familiar pace, boots never quite touching the ground as hers are bound to do. “Thirteen months to the day since Delilah’s tumultuous reign came to an abrupt end on one plane only to continue in another, immortalized in the richest pigments money can buy… and sentenced to rot in a forgotten vault amongst the precious heirlooms of her forefathers. How very much things have changed since then.” The Outsider stops, fixes her again under his scrutiny. “And how very little.”

Emily looks for some sign, a signal in the way he clasps his hands neatly behind him, in the hard edge of shoulders set back. But he is much the same as he ever was--and ever will be, she supposes--eternal and endless like the Void of his eyes. So, she must ask: “Should I assume things are about to take a hard turn for the worst?”

The Outsider’s brows arch. “Am I not allowed to call upon old friends from time to time, simply for the sake of calling?”

“Has there ever been any precedent?” she returns without a beat.

An air of amusement surrounds him then. “Corvo is not one to tell, and the others are beyond your reach for the asking.” He shrugs, letting the tilt of his head lead the gesture. “There’s no way for you to know for certain.”

She crosses her arms, imitates his mocking lilt. “What if I’m asking _you?_ ”

That slight turn of his lips again. “Then you should know better.”

How quickly one remembers how very _blessed_ silence is.

But Emily can’t deny she missed this: rhetorical phrases and poetic words, unanswered questions and puzzles to be solved--even the impulse to knock a god right in his impertinent jaw.  “Something else,” she says, “that has changed very little.”

“Ah, the ever-stubborn Emily Attano.” He dissolves into thin tendrils of smoke but his musing continues steadily on, just as clear and measured as it had before. “A shame that’s not the name history will remember.”

Something hitches in her chest. She cannot deny that it is a name she had said to herself before, years ago, that the syllables echo every now and then as she wonders, in the dark, what she might have been. Idle thoughts with no meaning; things are what they are. The path was set long ago, and it will not change.

But something hitches in her chest all the same, as he speaks that name into being.

“Emily Attano, blood of Gristol and Serkonos, child of sanguinated docks and sun-beaten streets.” It takes her a moment to find him again, perched a little above, just out of reach. He rests his chin on folded hands, elbows on knees, peering out into something she cannot see. “She dances in shadow, answers the silver call of steel, burns brighter than oil-fed flame. Hands inked in ichor and pitch welcoming the Void by night, greeting the light each day. She stands against the tides and does not falter; each time she is swept out to sea, she stands again at the tide’s next turn, stubborn as the moon that brings the waves, resolute as the sun which dries the shore.” The Outsider looks at her again, and this time, she knows he can see right down into the marrow of her bones; he has laid them so neatly out for her to see. “ _Esse_ ,” he says.

Every crack, every splinter and crevice hidden away in Emily’s chest seems all at once to buckle and fortify. Pride and shame, wistful heartbeats of hope that taste of blood and bitters and tea taken too sweet, that smell of perfume and leather and linseed oil. Her mouth runs dry, even as she knows she must speak, demand, scream--

Emily Attano, blood of Gristol and Serkonos, wakes again at dawn, as she must every day: Emily Drexel Lela Kaldwin, Empress of the Isles, First of Her Name. 

* * *

 

Three nights pass without sleep. Three nights on the streets chasing rumors and tasting salt on the wind. Three nights tempted to reach for the Void until it snaps back and devours her every thought from within, leaving nothing but black ash.

But Emily cannot avoid him forever--and does not know if she even wishes to. For three nights, every shadow hums like electricity; the air reeks of copper and petrichor, though it has not rained for days. Each midnight sky stands cloudless and still, yet the moon shows only the barest sliver of its face. Rats scurry underfoot, heard but not seen, and even in the deepest reaches of Dunwall, the cries of the whales echo on shingle and stone. The Outsider’s visit cannot be coincidence.  

Something is wrong, she knows that now for certain. What it has to do with reaching into the cage of her heart and turning her inside-out, Emily does not know. Part of her does not wish to.

* * *

 

The fourth night, she enters the Void: familiar, electric and indigo and onyx, whales keening in the distance like they had been expecting her, too. Emily sees him before she can call him out, make the demands on the tip of her tongue. The Outsider sits at the edge of her little, slate island, legs dangling over into the abyss. She stands only a few steps behind, words dead in her throat. It’s strange. He does not turn his head to look at her, does not shift in the slightest to acknowledge her presence.

“You could feel it,” he says. “The way the world bleeds.”

Any fire that was left to fuel an interrogation freezes in her veins. Emily purses her lips, flexes her hands uselessly at her sides. “Bleeds.” She addresses the back of his head, the high collar that brushes the dark hair at his nape. “Bleeds how?”

“With the Void.”

A crease pinches her brows. Has it not always done? Bonecharms and shrines and the Mark on her hand, all vehicles for the Void to interact with the waking world. If they did not blend and bleed, how--

“The difference is integrity. Imagine a ship--you know about ships, don’t you, Your Imperial Majesty?” The Outsider bows his head slightly, perhaps looking down at his hands or into the Void below--where, she is not sure. Emily is sure, however, that a solid blow between those shoulders would send him careening off the edge. _Does she know about ships_.

But she keeps her temper instead and takes a page from her father’s book, remaining silent until he continues.

“Imagine a ship. A whaling ship, if you will... one of those great monstrosities, as, of course, designed by Anton Sokolov.” Emily cannot see his face, but the syllables, as he speaks, seem unusually clipped. But--she knows better. She should not project humanity where there can be none. “In the bottom of the hull, there is a system of ballast tanks. In order to remain afloat while unburdened, the ship takes on a controlled amount of water. Weighed just enough below the surface, the ship can sail without fear of capsizing. But, when they come upon a whale and slay it, drag it, maimed and exhausted, on deck--some of that water must be pumped back out, released into the sea, lest the weight of the beast drag the entire ship and its crew, screaming, to the bottom.”

Emily hears the song again, crying through the Void. Her hair stands on end.  

The Outsider lifts his head, tilts it, listening. “What happens, Empress, if the pumps stop working?” The set of his shoulders is rounded, tired. “What happens when the ballast tanks fill to capacity? And what happens to an empty ship if they’re drained completely?”

The pieces come together, but she doesn’t understand.

“Emily?”

Her heart stutters painfully. She wets her lips. “It sinks.”

He nods, slowly, eyes on a nonexistent horizon. “It sinks.” 

* * *

 

The Outsider’s words haunt her waking hours from the moment the sun rises until its last rays fade into night. Emily leans upon her balcony rail, stares out where the black line of the sea meets the grey atmosphere, where rooftops stand as jagged silhouettes against the coming tide of night.

Into the darkened sky she stares, but as the shadows creep longer and longer over cut stone and as street-lamps wink to life, the stars seem to simply refuse to appear. Her jaw clenches tight, but the celestial bodies are not her subjects; she cannot command them. Emily closes her eyes, and a deep breath fills her lungs with an acrid taste of electricity that pools like the shifting energies of the Void. It turns her stomach. Something has changed, will change, is changing. She can feel it, sense it--but she cannot see it.

After all, when a boat begins to sink, it is not the sight of the ocean that heralds the first sign of its descent.

When Emily opens her eyes again, the world beyond her balcony is transformed. Dunwall’s skyline is gone, dissolved in great, black infinity, storm and steel and slate drifting slowly, ever-still, never and always moving. The stone beneath her hands is just an echo of the granite so familiar to her restless fingertips that play like spiders upon white and black and blue flecks winking in sunlight. But there is no sun nor moonlight here; beneath her palms rests only flat slate in the exact contour of her waking memory. If she focuses hard enough, she can see them both: a double-image of granite and basalt, like two mirrors facing one another to create and endless corridor of one and the other and the other and the other--

“Like Tyvian nesting dolls, one inside another.” The Outsider leans on the balcony from the opposite side, forearms braced casually on stone, feet suspended over the abyss. “A ship cradled in the sea, water keeping it afloat within and without. Always in contact--feeling, knowing.” He meets her eyes. “They occupy the same space, but never touch at all.”

Emily’s fingers tighten on the rail.

It’s like the whole world sweeps out from under her at once when she lets herself find his gaze properly; every time before, she has avoided going too far. _Terrible_ _eyes,_ she remembers writing, _black on black_. But that never captured how looking into them feels like falling, swept rapidly toward infinity, hurled heel over head into the gaping maw of the Void.

This time, she almost thinks she can see the colors of her world those depths, too. Searing flame and blood on silver, sunlight refracted across the waves, and silken banners whipped by the wind.

“How?” Emily asks with the first breath she can manage, coming back to herself, blinking away the vision, hands trembling. She clenches them into tight fists, knuckles scraping on stone. “What keeps the ship from sinking?”

“Me.” He says it so plainly, so short and blithe on his lips that she thinks she must have hallucinated it. The Outsider, succinct. That, she must be imagining.

But when he offers no more, she is forced to believe. Her brow knits together tightly, a sharp frown etching her lips. “If you are the ballast… then you should be able to keep the world afloat.” But something isn’t quite right. It tugs at the back of her mind, buzzes in her ears like a gnat.

“With every gift, I regulate the ballast.” He fits his fingers neatly together, pulls his palms slightly apart to cup the empty space between, like a long-prowed boat. “The Void flows in regularity, controlled; it passes harmlessly in dreams, sounds the depths of the oceans with whalesong. The Void serves as both ballast and sea to your ship of a world.” He spreads his hands completely, an open gesture of simplicity. “I create the valves and pumps that allow it to pass the way it should. Even the Abbey does their part with sacred notes that steal and seal away the water when it becomes too heavy.”

If Emily thought the world had been turned on its head before, that was but a ripple compared to the tidal swell that rises before her now. The Abbey of the Everyman, principle enemy of the Outsider, exterminator of heretics, and bringers of light in darkness--an unknowing ally of the entity they so ardently despise?

An entity, it seems, of _order_.

He shakes his head just slightly, amusement teasing pale lips. “ _Balance_ \--” His voice wraps around the syllables like a gentle correction. “--is delicate, but determined to perpetuate, prolonging itself like a pendulum, swinging endlessly under its own weight. As the whaling ship sails out to meet its quarry, balanced and unburdened, little regulation of the ballast is required at any given time.” He pushes away from the balcony and begins to pace the void in measured steps, one, two, three. “I am the hand that turns the valve only when necessary. Or, some might say, I am the system itself--power passes first through me, a mere vessel between the raging sea and fragile ship as it sails ever in danger of being crushed beneath the monumental pressure of darkened waves.” He stops, stands. Perfectly still, not even the semblance of breath to stir his chest or shoulders.

Dread settles, hot and heavy as a stone, in the pit of Emily’s stomach. She is no philosopher, but it does not take a genius to read the silent spaces between words.

The Outsider closes his eyes. “And so it should have continued, but all things must have their end. And my end began with Delilah.”

Without the infinite weight of his gaze, Emily finds she can see him now, see what should have been glaringly obvious from the moment she first saw him tonight. He is so _small_. So fair and frail. The Outsider has never looked alive, exactly, always too pale, a reflection of souls drowned in the ocean’s black depths, but now... dark bruises surround his eyes, deeper, she’s sure, than before. White lips and sallow cheeks, something in his bearing disheveled, struggling hold itself together.  All at once, she wonders if this is why she did not see his face three nights ago--if he knew, and was hiding. _Hiding_. Like nothing more than a man.

In this moment, Emily realizes just how little she knows of him. Much more than anyone in centuries, she’s sure--but how very little it is, standing before him now.

Standing before a dying god.

A hundred questions burn her mind, her tongue, but only one escapes: “Why me?”

 _Why would you tell me?_ A million people across her empire alone--and so many, many more beyond. Emily is but one grain of sand in the sun, waiting for her turn to be swallowed by the waves and dragged out to sea. Nothing more than a flash in the pan, setting in motion a bullet whose devastation she will not witness. In another four thousand years, there will be nothing of her, no monument nor memory to indicate she ever existed.

The Outsider could have spoken to anyone, or no one at all.

But he spoke to her, just as he had before, all those months ago. The answer is there, in her memory of a twin-bladed knife, of etchings on an ancient altar, of choking vines that marked Delilah’s poisonous influence. “You want me to help you.”

All at once, that piercing infinity snaps back to life, all attention fixed upon her. “What I want is irrelevant.” His voice is measured, sharp--too quick to be believed.

Emily’s brow creases. She knows how to play semantics; she began her education at six years old, at Empress Jessamine Kaldwin’s knee. “Then what is it you _need?_ ”

A strange expression passes over his face, something lightly patronizing that bristles her dignity, something melancholic that captures her sympathy. “Time is a strange thing,” he says, as though she had not spoken at all, words flowing like a brook over polished stones, unbothered by her questions, a stream that suffers no interruption. “The Void remembers everything, backward and forward--things that never came to pass, things that may be, things that are… and things that were, but wound up irrevocably altered. The last are wounds that end up as a double-memory, existing both at once, touching where they should not.” The Outsider’s eyes never leave her face. “I did warn you about tampering with the past, Your Imperial Majesty.”

She opens her mouth, closes it, looking like a fool. An empress should not be shocked to silence. But then, she supposes, a god has no business dying, either.

“A small act of kindness--one you weren’t certain would make a difference. It was a noble thing, returning Aramis Stilton and Billie Lurk to themselves; you had no reason to believe that one little action could help you regain your father or your crown.” He reaches forward, drumming his fingers along the balcony rail without a sound. “Two little things you were able to make right without personal gain, things that sent ripples throughout Karnaca, throughout the Void.” The Outsider tilts his head slightly, looking into and past her in a way that makes her skin crawl like frost on a window-pane. “With one selfless act, you sealed the fate of a god.” His mouth twitches in the most genuine expression of amusement she has ever seen; it isn’t smug, it isn’t knowing nor wicked nor deprecating. It is… _charmed_ \--and that only makes the bile rise in Emily’s throat as her stomach turns itself inside-out. “A most impressive legacy, my dear Emily.”

The world snaps back into place with a dizzying rush of energy like blood roaring in her ears, obscuring her vision after a fall. Her moonlit balcony and the Wrenhaven below swim slowly into focus like the surface of a pool steadying after the track of a boot, dark shapes settling into familiar pictures. A shaking breath does little to calm frayed nerves, nothing at all to ease a drowning mind.

In the darkness, she is alone, Mark burning as fiercely as the night it was received, searing her from the inside.


End file.
